måndag 18 januari 2010

Ekonomin subsystem till ekosystemet

"In its physical dimensions, the economy is an open subsystem of the earth's ecosystem, which is finite, nongrowing and materially closed. As the economic subsystem grows, it incorporates an ever greater proportion of the total ecosystem into itself and must reach a limit at 100 percent, if not before. Therefore its growth is not sustainable."

"While the focus on physical, tangible resources seems quite obvious for those whowork on local hunting-gathering or agrarian societies it has been less commonplaceamong those who study modern economies where national accounts dominate. Thiscritique, explicit or implicit, of the monetarist (or economist) disguise of the ‘real’economy of material resources is certainly not new. The merit of bringing it up thistime is that this naturalist intuition is starting to get backed up by a growing body ofresearch that actually presents an alternative to the financial statistics. Anthropologist Thomas Abel connects to Howard T. Odum’s preoccupation with flows of resources and how to discern a ‘realistic’ account of the economy from a sustainable point of view. Sociologist Thomas D. Hall and biologist Peter Turchin argue, with a conceptual start in population ecology, that there are long-term ‘pulsations’ indicating that there is a ‘system’ at work and that material flows generate effects that are long term and far-reaching geographically, summarized as ‘long-distance synchronicity’.